Sir Clive Woodward yesterday started his new job as director of elite performance at the British Olympic Association. There was no space for him to park his car at the BOA's headquarters in Wandsworth, south London, nor was a secretary waiting to greet him. But there was an office with his name on it.
That, at least, was one up on what happened to Woodward when he arrived at the Rugby Football Union in 1997 to take over as England's coach. Then, the receptionist had not heard of him and Don Rutherford, the director of rugby for the RFU, expressed surprise he had shown up at Twickenham because they were expecting him to work from home. Typically, Woodward just opened up his briefcase, switched on his mobile phone, plugged in his laptop and began working in the reception of rugby's HQ.
An office was found for Woodward that afternoon and it was from there he began to plot England's path to World Cup success in Australia in 2003, establishing himself as the most celebrated coach of his generation. But winning the final meant getting one team to perform on one day in one tournament; at the BOA it will be a much more complicated situation.
Officially, he is responsible for the 35 sports the BOA oversees, including the seven that make up the winter Games, but it is commonly held that his sole directive is to help ensure Britain finish fourth in the medals table at the 2012 Olympics in London, the target set by the government.
Woodward's appointment took nearly everyone by surprise. Only a few days earlier he had been discussing with the RFU a possible return to Twickenham as its head of elite performance, only to be overlooked in favour of Rob Andrew. He then suddenly emerged at the BOA in a £300,000-per-year job that was never advertised and for which a job description has never been published.
Just like his previous role as director of football at Southampton, Woodward's appointment has provoked plenty of controversy. UK Sport, the distributor of nearly £100m worth of national lottery funding per year to the 26 summer Olympic sports which will feature in the 2012 Games, is angry that it only found out about Woodward's appointment two weeks ago when he rang Sue Campbell, the organisation's chair and his former lecturer at Loughborough university, to tell her it was about to be announced.
There are many officials within UK Sport who are suspicious about his role. It remains the central organisation in the preparations for 2012 and is the agency to which the national governing bodies set their targets and are ultimately answerable. There are already fears within UK Sport that Woodward is being used as a pawn by Lord Colin Moynihan, the chairman of the BOA, which is privately funded and does not receive any state assistance.
Earlier this year Moynihan risked provoking a major row with the chancellor Gordon Brown over funding for Britain's Olympic sports, and there are plenty of key figures who believe that the Tory peer, the sports minister under Margaret Thatcher, is trying to introduce the radical measures he proposed in his independent sports review, Raising the Bar, by stealth.
UK Sport already employs Liz Nicholl as its head of elite performance and Peter Keen, who is considered to be the guru of achieving high performance in Olympic sport after his successful overhauling of British cycling. Woodward will meet them today for the first time and they will demand guarantees that his work will not overlap what they are already doing.
One of the reasons for Woodward's success with England was that he could mould the side in his own personality by employing a team of highly-paid specialists. It will be fascinating to see if he can do the same in sports ranging from sailing, in which Britain have topped the medal table at the last two Games, to handball, a sport few people here would recognise.
At least when Woodward moved in at Southampton he had already made it public in his autobiography Winning! that football had always been his main passion. There are no comments on record that he harbours similar feelings about canoeing, archery or volleyball, sports with a limited budget which generally rely on the goodwill of volunteers to survive. It is doubtful they will attain the level of professionalism Woodward will demand - due to a lack of resources rather than willingness - and how he reacts when they fail to achieve what he wants will ultimately determine his success in this new role.
For now, though, those involved in the 26 sports scheduled for 2012 should perhaps enjoy the fact that leading them is a coach whose philosophy is best summed up in the introduction of Winning! "I wanted to compete," he wrote. "I wanted to be the best. I wanted to win." If just a tiny bit of that desire rubs off on them Woodward will have deserved his office.
